There Will (Not) Be Blood: Ottinger Returns with Anemic Vampire Comedy
New German Wave legend Ulrike Ottinger returns with her long gestating project The Blood Countess (Die Blutgräfin), a comedic take on the infamous Erzsébet Báthory legend which, at one point, was intending to star Tilda Swinton as the titular royal ogre. However, the project’s other headliner, Isabelle Huppert, thankfully remained intact for the long run, adding a bloodthirsty vampire to her coterie of villains. In many ways, it fits exactly in the bizarro realm of Ottinger’s 1970s output, with Huppert occupying the same outrageously weird space often inhabited by Delphine Seyrig (whom Huppert also starred as the younger version of during the same period with Liliane de Kermadec’s Aloïse). The highly anticipated end result feels like something of a mixed bag, and arguably isn’t the best way to start an experience with Ottinger’s filmography. Still, Huppert, looking like a glamorous Dietrich era femme fatale, is highly enjoyable as a famished ghoul on the hunt for a dangerous book which has the capacity to extinguish her race.
Every twenty-five years, The Blood Countess (Huppert) descends upon Vienna for a mass feeding. She reunites with her trusty vampire helpmate, the maid Hermine (Birgit Minichmayr), who still works at the same hotel, The Queen of Hungary, where the Countess holes up. This time, blood sucking is not their only mission, as they must locate and destroy a sacred text, which, if it receives the tears of a vampire, will cause the crier to become mortal. As they hunt for the book, they’re joined by Baron Rudi Bubi von Strudl zur Buchtelau (Thomas Schubert), the Countess’ hapless, vegetarian vampire nephew, and his oblivious psychotherapist (Lars Eidinger). A pair of elderly vampireologists, Theobastus Bombastus (André Jung) and Nepomuk Afterbite (Marco Lorenzini) also trail them.
The real problem with The Blood Countess isn’t necessarily its droll tone or superficial double entendres laced with fluffy jokes, as Huppert and Birgit Minichmayr (looking as if she’d be perfect in a prequel to Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches, 1990) are often quite entertaining in their own strange way. It’s the most vibrant use of Minichmayr since Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009), though one can’t say the same for Mr. Eidinger. But an overstuffed supporting cast of geriatric vampires and their hunters, all replete with their own cornball character names, tend to detract from the main course. Of a particular grating quality is Thomas Schubert (of Christian Petzold’s Afire, 2023) as Rudi Bubi, a vegetarian vampire perpetually cloaked in booger green apparel who obnoxiously desires to find the dreaded book to release himself from perpetual hunger. He’s paired with Lars Eidinger as a therapist who doubts his patient’s tall tales, each onscreen moment only confirming Eidinger is due for a role requiring him to act and/or change his hairstyle (see a previous turn alongside Huppert in About Joan, 2022).
The cinematography from Martin Gschlacht is lush and often more intoxicating than the various antics required by an extended scavenger hunt through the bowels of Vienna, including the introductory sequence of La Huppert as she glides through a subterranean cavern affixed to a red cloaked boat, floating through an abandoned gypsum mine like a blood clot. It announces a similarity to Ottinger’s most narratively complex title from her Berlin trilogy, Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press (1984). But the visual similarities tend to dissipate from there. Huppert’s wardrobe, on the other hand, is the only real cause for swooning, and it’s a pity Ottinger didn’t care to reference one of Seyrig’s most underrated roles in Daughters of Darkness (1971) as a tonal conduit. The only other delectable camp moments arrive courtesy of Austrian Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst, first as the Mistress of Ceremonies in a blood ball (which feels like the arthouse version of the opening ‘blood rave’ in 1998’s Blade), and then as themselves, belting out a ballad as the third act comes crashing down. Still, it’s a more innovative experience than Julie Delpy’s straightforward English language hodgepodge The Countess (2008).
The film, oddly, is a reunion between Nobel Prize winning writer Elfriede Jelinek and Huppert, who previously worked together on the iconic The Piano Teacher (2001). Much like the crumbling, autobiographical world documented in Jelinek’s previous perversion, The Blood Countess is a throwback to a fading society of an elitist subculture similarly preying on the vulnerable. There might not be a lot of belly laughs, but there are moments of wicked amusement courtesy of its little love bites.
Reviewed on February 17th at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival (76th edition) – Berlinale Special section. 119 mins.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
